Luke, Redesign v. Realign
I really liked this article. As designers when we are approached by a client we always start to redesign their project. Sometimes all they want is a realign though. This article defines what a redesign is and what a realign is. The way each is approached is different and when they are followed I think it will lead to more happy clients. The hard part is defining when each is needed. This article will help with that. Web designers give this a read.

Mike, Better Buttons with CSS3
With better browser support, CSS3 is finally starting to get some traction. While IE is still emerging from the dark ages, there’s no reason we can’t start using CSS3. Web Designer Wall recently published an article on creating web buttons with nothing more than CSS. Even though rounded corners, gradients, text shadows, and box shadows aren’t all supported, your buttons will look fantastic for browsers that do, and perfectly usable for the ones that don’t.

Check it out here: Magento and Stackable Hosting, A Perfect Fit!

We have run a couple of installs on Stackable and it truly is a great product. If you haven’t already, check out our Magento specific site – Magento Mavens

For more information:

Event Website
Facebook Event Page

1. Custom Font Replacement: We had been using sIFR, but shortly after we built this site, cufón came around and we fell in love. Any custom fonts you see are now generated by cufón.

2. Dynamic Sidebar: The old sidebar was hard coded. I took that out and made each section it’s own widget which allows to move them around easily if needed and also add third-party widgets should we choose to do so.

3. RSS: I created a FeedBurner RSS so be sure to update – http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheCodeDojo

4. The Clan: Under The Clan section in the sidebar, you can now click on one of the names and it takes you to a new page with that persons bio and all the posts they have written.

5. Facebook Fan Page: We started a Facebook Fan Page – you can become a fan here: http://www.facebook.com/CodeGreene

6. Custom Share Icons: Mike built us custom share icons to fit our ninja theme. Thanks Mike!

7. Contact Page: Rather than sending you, the user, to codegreene.com to fill out a contact form, you can now send us your requests by going here: http://dojo.codegreene.com/ninjas-for-hire – so drop us a line.

A few subtle changes will be coming in the future – let us know what you think!

Luke, Future of Web Typography
For years typography on the web has been very limited when compared to what can be in the print world. Over the last few years though we have been given more and more tools to help us accomplish good typography on the web. As time goes on these tools will get better and will become more widely supported. There was an article on Smashing Magazine this week that talked about a lot of these tools that are available to web designers. I really enjoyed reading up, refreshing my memory of code I haven’t used in a while, and also learning some new ways of styling type. Read it over, the text on your website will be very happy you did.

Benjam, 20 Helpful jQuery Methods You Should Be Using
While developing a website, I use a lot of tools, both in the creation of the website files (my text editor of choice, file manager, etc.), and within the website itself (CakePHP, jQuery, CSS, etc.), and I’m always interested in finding features of those tools that I might not be very familiar with.  While I have a deep familiarity with the features I use regularly, and a passing familiarity with most of the features of these tools, it’s always good to get a refresher on what I could be using more.  Here is a post highlighting 20 jQuery methods/features (actually 33 methods in 20 groups) that should be in everybody’s familiarity tool box.

Mac, April Fools – PHP Style
This discusses a topic that we often only think about once or twice a year, but it is still worthy of our attention and deserves some practice to improve our skills. Also, while you are there, subscribe to the PHP Developers feed. The main guy, Chris Cornutt, does an excellent job of filtering the best PHP articles.

Lets say that a client decided they would like the background of every other <li> tag to be darker than the rest. This <li> is created dynamically. In the past I would have to go contact a Back End Dev and have him write some code to put a class on every other <li>. Then I would go style those with the new class. With the use of the nth-child pseudo selector I can do this with the CSS alone. Here’s how:

ul li:nth-child(2n+1) { background:#212121; }

The expression 2n+1 will match the first, third, fifth, seventh, and so on, elements if they exist. 2n+1 isn’t the only expression you can run. Here is a list of a few possibilities:

• 4n+1 would select the first, fifth, ninth, thirteenth…
• 4n would select fourth, eighth, twelfth, sixteenth…
• -n+5 would select fifth, fourth, third, second, first, none

If this isn’t making perfect sense yet just run the math loop in your head and it will. Lets take the first example again. 2n+1

• 2*0+1=1
• 2*1+1=3
• 2*2+1=5
• 2*3+1=7

Before we go out and use this everywhere I should point out that IE doesn’t support this in any of its versions. The saving point to this though is that jQuery does support all CSS selectors so if you are using jQuery you should be fine. For examples of how the nth-child works with jQuery see this page. Happy Coding.

So, I’m going to do my part: I found a workaround that I think might work very well for a lot of people who run into this problem. It’s biggest advantage is that it is very very easy to try, and has almost no downside, even if it doesn’t work for your particular situation. In my case, I found that Apache did indeed have a lot of files open, including log files for all my VirtualHosts, all the libraries that httpd depends on, files from sites that are hosted there (though it seems to open and close those just fine), and a large buildup of hundreds of entries for /tmp that were open and apparently never got closed properly. In my case, the server in question has an uptime of over 2 years, and while “apachectl restart” runs at least daily for log rotation, it seems that doesn’t really close unused file descriptors. The workaround I discovered was running “apachectl stop” followed by “apachectl start” which fixed the problem completely for me, at least for the next year or two I hope. From over 1600 open files, after restarting Apache fully that way, it only reopened about 325 files. And the imap_open() calls started succeeding as they should.

One last thought before I hop off my soapbox: when you find an answer to a problem, and that answer was hard to find or was not well documented, do your part to remedy that for the next guy or girl to hit that problem, and post your solution somewhere that Google will find it. It makes the internet a better place for all of us, and makes us all more productive. Who knows, maybe down the road you’ll run into the same problem again yourself, and not remember how to solve it until you find your own post from years before, and it will be your own time you’ll save. I fully recognize that a lot of what I accomplish each day is based on work done by others that I have found and emulated, as they say, standing on the shoulders of giants. Each contribution to the body of human knowledge lets us reach that much higher, so when you can, add your bit and as we all do that, it adds up.

SEO is an interesting process. We here at White Label SEO would like to talk about how important SEO is to your overall success of your website. We would like to thank Code Greene for this opportunity to post a message about SEO to their blog. Thanks Code Greene! One quick word on Code Greene. We have dealt with numerous web developing firms and Code Greene is one of the best. Thanks guys!

So how do you work on optimizing your site. There are a lot of things that need to be done. How is your content? Is your content keyword rich? Are you putting links in the proper places of your site etc? All of this is important, but when it comes to starting a successful campaign you need to know YOUR COMPETITION! At White Label SEO we evaluate your competitors. Why is this? Well, for a few reasons. First, your competition might be large. You may have a lot of competitors that have been doing SEO for awhile so it is important to know who it is and what kind of traffic they are receiving and what keywords they are using. This is all important information to know when it comes to keyword selection and the success of your website. Research your competitors. Once you understand what your competition is doing you can start to build your keyword list that you otherwise may not have chosen if you haven’t looked at your competitors.

Search Engine Optimization is not like PPC. The results are not instant. It takes time and work to get in the top SERP of the engines. Knowing your competitors will help you gauge your success and help you determine your goals. The greatest way to turn an ROI on your site is through organic SEO. So you need to expect to spend a good amount of investment on your own developing your site and creating a web page that people want to link to. This is just a quick start for people that need to gain some insight on SEO. Know who you are up against and build your site and SEO campaign based off that knowledge. We wish you the best of luck in your efforts of climbing to the top of the search engines.

Quintin Smith – White Label SEO
For SEO Services, please contact Quintin and quintin@whitelabelseo.com

A friend tipped us off that Abduzeedo had a Friday post on the Awesomeness of Ninjas, mentioning the article probably deserved a spot on the dojo blog. I couldn’t agree more.

From the day I interviewed at Code Greene, Mark (the head sensei here), explained that he was assembling a team of ninjas to do his bidding. Our business has borrowed Japanese philosophy in a number of areas; namely, The Toyota Way, kaizen, and eliminating muda as it applies to workflow and personal improvement. We have 3 actual ninja swords in the office, and we once killed a guy. Well, that’s not entirely true, I can’t actually vouch for the authenticity of the swords.

Anyways, all I really wanted to say is that ninjas are awesome. Go check out the post and relish in their glory.

Mike, Get your form on with Uniform
We’ve all been there. You finish an amazing design using some sweet custom form elements that perfectly match the theme of your design. Then after a few frustrating attempts, you realize that some form elements just can’t be styled. Or if they can, not consistently. So you throw on a border, maybe a background image, and hope for the best as dreams of your custom UI vanish into nothingness. But fear not! Using the clever jQuery script Uniform and some CSS sprites, your form designs can once more be glorious! Works beautifully in all major browsers (degrades gracefully in IE6).

Benjam, The Problem with Passwords
Being in the Web Development industry for a while now, and having had a few third-party scripts that were on my site hacked, I have become more and more interested in web security.  Passwords are on the front lines to that.  Being a user of Web technologies, I’m also interested in usability and choice, and when it comes to showing or hiding passwords (what? you can do that?) I’m in the boat of give the user the choice.  This article nicely explains a few examples that offer people the choice to show or hide their passwords, both of which are very useful.

Mark, Microsoft to Double Down on HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9
Doubling down seems like the wrong approach to me. If I were the CEO at Microsoft I would instead of thinking of trying to put their foot down harder, they should instead learn to bend in the winds of the market and work on compliance with the other browsers. Though I hate to say it even forced upgrades like Firefox does would be good, to keep people current and reduce the amount of cross browsers compatibility problems Microsoft gives developers. I don’t think Microsoft realizes that by making developers lives bad by trying to be different they are actually building up a mass market of developers who hate them because it is so difficult to make cross compatibility easy and affordable.